A member of LA’s Countywide Benefits Entitlement Services Team offers help to a woman staying at a homeless shelter. Photo by Michael Owen Baker/Countywide Communications

“If President Trump really wants to help, he should declare this what it is – a state of emergency. He should bring to bear an arsenal of resources – fiscal support, relief from regulatory burdens, and the reversal of discriminatory policies that his administration has sponsored – so we can immediately build a larger safety net and help people get off the streets immediately.”

https://ridley-thomas.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/31762717678_44e7bac52a_z.jpg427640adminhttps://ridley-thomas.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/MRT-Banner_nonChairman.pngadmin2019-09-11 15:46:442019-09-11 15:46:44Statement by Supervisor Ridley-Thomas on President Trump Pushing for a Crackdown on Homelessness in California

Coroner’s officials remove the body of a homeless man found on the sidewalk at Massachusetts Avenue and Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles on Sept. 1, 2019.(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The balding, middle-aged man was facedown on a flattened piece of cardboard, arms at his side, a small pool of blood near his mouth. He wore bluejeans, his feet were bare, and headset buds were still in his ears.

Two LAPD officers who responded to the emergency call from a passerby had pitched a white pop-up tent around the body, which lay on the sidewalk of Massachusetts Avenue between Sepulveda Boulevard and the 405 Freeway in West Los Angeles.

It was Sunday morning, the middle of Labor Day weekend, three-quarters of the way into a year in which deaths of homeless people in Los Angeles County are on a record-setting pace to top 1,000, according to preliminary numbers from the county coroner.

“I hope this will be another wake-up call that urgency is the order of the day,” said County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who called it incomprehensible and unacceptable that dying on the streets has become routine.

On average, nearly three homeless people are dying daily in the county, nearly double the rate of deaths by homicide. Illness, addiction, accidents, suicide and the ravages of being unsheltered are among the primary causes of death.

“We know the research says that people who are what’s called rough sleepers, those who are living on the streets and not in a shelter or a car, are 10 times more likely to die than the regular population,” said Dr. Susan Partovi, citing a study in Boston. Partovi has been administering to homeless people in Los Angeles for years.

The average age of the first 666 homeless people who died in L.A. County as of Aug. 25 was 51, well below the county’s average life expectancy of roughly 80. Homeless people are dying on sidewalks, along riverbeds, and in tents, parks, shelters, vehicles, motels and hospitals.

You can call it a travesty. An emergency. A call to action.

It is all those things.

Bodies are being found in virtually every corner of the county, a grim consequence of the intensifying epidemic of homelessness. In 2012, 407 homeless people died in L.A. County. The number has gone up sharply every year, to last year’s record high of 921.

This year, the toll hit 525 in just the first six months — 88 more than over the same period a year earlier — and the pace has been steady since then.

New York City has roughly the same number of homeless people as Los Angeles County, but has moved tens of thousands of them into shelters. Despite much harsher weather, New York recorded 292 homeless deaths in 2018, fewer than one-third the Los Angeles total.

“We’re seeing homeless deaths in areas where we didn’t see them five or 10 years ago,” said Brian Elias, chief of investigations for the county coroner’s office.

Elias’ boss, Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Jonathan Lucas, said his office is stepping up its analysis of trend lines and causes of death to help address the crisis.

“We need to be taking this information and looping it back to the departments of mental health and public health, to the policymakers, the county supervisors, and present it in a way that can help inform their decisions,” said Lucas, adding that he’s passionate about what he considers a duty to the community.

The coroner’s office noted that the six-month increase in deaths over last year was roughly proportional to the increase in the total number of homeless people from a year earlier.

The first 666 deaths of the year included 42 homicides and 27 suicides. Males vastly outnumbered females, 83% to 17%, and the victims included 253 white people, 220 Latinos and 168 African Americans.

Substance abuse and heart conditions, sometimes in conjunction, were among the leading causes of death, but no cause had been determined in about 100 of the cases.

The coroner’s reports, filled with clinical language and dispassionate narratives, are ghostly sketches of social disorder, poverty, violence, addiction and isolation. They speak to a breakdown that extends beyond homelessness and reaches into our economy, our schools, our criminal justice and healthcare systems.

In a region of abundant wealth and world-class hospitals, people die penniless, they die in pain, they die alone.

On Jan. 1, a 37-year-old African American woman died at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank after being found unresponsive a day earlier on a sidewalk in North Hollywood, one week after giving birth to a girl. The woman had a history of asthma and substance abuse. On her left arm was an “RIP” tattoo.

On Jan. 20, a security guard noticed a man sitting awkwardly, with an open beer at his side, near a business on Telstar Avenue in El Monte. The guard touched the man, got no response and dialed 911. Paramedics pronounced the 71-year-old white man dead at the scene.

On Feb. 6, a 27-year-old Latino male with a history of depression died on Foothill Boulevard, west of Osborne Street, in Pacoima. According to the coroner’s report, the young man had attempted suicide a week earlier and was placed on psychiatric hold.

At 8:45 p.m. on the 6th, says the coroner’s report, the man’s “father heard the decedent moving around outside their tent. He heard a gasp of air but did not check. 10 minutes later the decedent’s father went outside of their tent and found the decedent hanging from a tree. He cut the decedent down.”

In the case of the man who died Sunday in West Los Angeles, I arrived on the scene at the same time as coroner’s investigator Adrian Munoz, 29.

He sized up the scene. No drug paraphernalia was visible. There were no obvious signs of struggle. Munoz ran his gloved hands over the man’s head, feeling for evidence of trauma. He found nothing.

Los Angeles Police Officers Jeff Duarte and Ray Leung told me there were a lot of homeless people in the area, most of them veterans who get services at the nearby Veterans Affairs campus .

The victim, who was African American, appeared to have been traveling lightly. No shopping cart filled with belongings. No tent or tarps. Just a red sleeping bag, his backpack and a few Budweiser tallboys he never got to.

Munoz performed his duty with an air of respect, taking care in offering this one last service to a fellow human being. He crouched, laid his hands under the man and turned him onto his back. The man’s mouth was bloody. His gray eyes aimed skyward, in the direction of wispy clouds and sunstruck palms.

Munoz checked inside the man’s mouth for signs of trauma. Nothing there. He lifted the man’s shirt, examined his torso.

“A scar in the middle of his chest,” Munoz said. A possible heart procedure.

Munoz laid a clear plastic sheet over the man, then placed a white sheet on top of that.

In the man’s wallet, Munoz found a driver’s license, a bank card and a state medical benefits card. In the backpack, he found a little blue packet of Alka-Seltzer, several pairs of fresh socks and some medicine vials. It appeared that the man had been a patient at the Venice Family Clinic. Those details should help the coroner’s office in the next phase of its investigation: trying to determine who the man was, how he ended up alone and dead on this stretch of sidewalk, and whether he has family to notify.

Only a few days earlier, I had spoken to Carrie Kowalski, a physician’s assistant at the clinic. On her street medicine rounds, she had told me, she sees every conceivable malady and a lot of addiction. A common theme among her patients, she said, is that “something went wrong from childhood and started someone on a path” to physical, mental and addiction issues.

“It can be physical violence, abuse in the foster care system, sexual abuse, the experience of veterans, and you become homeless and now you’ve got more trauma,” Kowalski said. “You get hit by a car or you get raped and you get beaten. Your stuff is stolen and it becomes this huge mess, and it snowballs.”

As does the death count.

Ridley-Thomas recently called for creating enough shelter and housing for everyone, and imposing a requirement that homeless people come indoors.

Those are big, expensive, difficult challenges. But losing ground, as we currently are, is not acceptable, Ridley-Thomas said. We need more psychiatric emergency services, more addiction rehab and more recuperative care so that homeless patients don’t go from hospitals straight back to the streets.

In the area around the West L.A. death, I couldn’t find anyone who knew the dead man. A homeless guy named Kenny told me he knew of someone hit and killed by a car nearby. A homeless guy named Emerson said someone was found dead on Westwood Boulevard.

“I got to get off the streets,” said a homeless guy named Adam.

A van from the coroner’s office pulled up to Massachusetts Avenue about 12:30 p.m. and Munoz helped the driver lift the body into the vehicle.

The day was young as the van headed to the morgue, but the man was already the third homeless person to die on Sunday.

And the 680th to die this year.

LA Times Staff writers Ben Welsh and Maloy Moore contributed to the column.

There are two ways to tackle California’s greatest public safety, public health and humanitarian crisis: homelessness. One way is to marshal resources, build programs, replicate successes, and say, with some justification, that we have helped a lot of people, even if the overall situation isn’t much better.

The other way is to define a clear policy, a compelling objective, and the rights and obligations necessary to achieve that objective.

Our state’s objective should be clear: Housing is a human right, and having a roof over your head should be a legal right.

We are only two members of the Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new homeless task force, and we respect that our other members, the governor and his administration, and the Legislature will give input and guide this critical work.

We also wanted to launch the debate with a big idea. So we called last month for a right to shelter, and an obligation for people to accept shelter. That caused a predictable stir.

Some advocates criticized it for potentially diverting attention from building permanent supportive housing.

Civil libertarians attacked the notion that even when we have enough beds for all to sleep, that California would ever require people to sleep indoors.

We have listened to the criticisms and concerns. A right to housing, a right to a roof over one’s head, is a better policy than a limited right to shelter.

This discussion goes back as far as 1944, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a second Bill of Rights, in which he included “the right of every family to a decent home.”

This right should define our state’s obligation and motivate our drive to end this unacceptable suffering. Make this right the public policy of California, and we will both focus our resources and programs more effectively and no longer tacitly accept the current reality of thousands of people living on the street.

We do not advocate replicating New York’s right to shelter. There is not enough focus in New York’s effort yet to build more permanent housing with the necessary services to help people transition out of their shelter system.

The right New York articulates is nonetheless powerful. If New York can get 95% of the homeless people off the streets, so can we. We must do it in the California way—whatever it takes.

The word shelter implies to many people an unsafe, crowded living space where people linger with little or no help. That’s an inadequate term for the service-rich housing hubs we are describing.

San Francisco calls them Navigation Centers. In Los Angeles, it’s Bridge Housing. In Sacramento, we’re planning to call them Rehousing Shelters. Their sole goal is to help people stabilize their lives and transition to permanent housing. We need more centers like these to address the immediate suffering of those sleeping outdoors.

The idea that we must choose between such bridge shelters and permanent housing is unproductive. Permanent housing is the most important objective, but it will be many years before we achieve our housing goals, and in the meantime, shouldn’t we do everything in our power to bring people indoors?

The Bay Area Council found that it would take until 2034 to permanently house everyone currently homeless in the Bay Area. The immense suffering experienced by people too long forgotten cannot wait.

Some who support our principles ask a fair question: How would we pay for this new right, which is expected to cost $1.5 billion a year? We could start by more effectively using our massive existing resources, including the Mental Health Services Act and local initiatives.

As for the obligation to take shelter, this is not the thrust of our proposal. We have dedicated our public careers to civil rights and civil liberties, and we believe most people on the streets want to come inside and will come inside with consumer-driven, focused and compassionate outreach combined with safe housing.

Ours is a simple plea that the public policy of California clearly state that sleeping safely indoors is an essential first step to helping people and alleviating this ever growing crisis.

There may be better ideas than we have proposed. Certainly, there must be an equal or greater focus on what it takes to prevent people who are housed and fragile from becoming fragile and homeless. We need legislation to stabilize the rental market by preventing price gouging and the eviction of tenants without just cause.

We will compile and highlight the best practices from around the state. We will listen. We will insist on regional approaches and solutions. Most importantly, we will help the Gov. Newsom and the state define a clear North Star that will drive our work.

https://ridley-thomas.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/DJA_6590-1.jpg15662349adminhttps://ridley-thomas.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/MRT-Banner_nonChairman.pngadmin2019-08-26 15:54:052019-09-03 13:57:19Calmatters: California should make clear there is a right to housing, not simply shelter

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, and Hawaii Lt. Gov. Josh Green, M.D., joined a panel of experts in San Francisco to reflect on homelessness as a public health crisis and to explore potential solutions. Destination Health: Solving Homelessness was the first of Kaiser Permanente’s Thought Leadership series on the future of health.

LOS ANGELES (ABC) — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s appointed co-chairs of the state homelessness task force appeared together on Eyewitness Newsmakers, L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

Ridley-Thomas is calling for a state of emergency over the homeless crisis, saying the declaration would speed plans for a right to shelter. That’s a controversial shelter proposal providing beds for the homeless and compelling them to accept them. He said, “We believe that a right to housing is fundamental in the context of a democratic society. We want to cause it to move forward because of the urgency of the hour. Therefore we call for a state of emergency. It would cause us to have more tools to help those who are in desperate need of our intervention.”

Since they proposed a right to shelter policy, the task force co-chairs have heard from critics who say it would make it a crime to be homeless and shelters would be warehouses. They say they would change the New York model their proposal is based on.

Steinberg said, “We can improve on New York’s right to shelter that’s been around four decades, with admitted flaws, because they haven’t worked hard enough to actually join the intensive services with case management.”

Ridley-Thomas added, “We take the position this is not about criminalizing the poor or the homeless. It is about restoring dignity and worth and purpose to their lives.”

Critics also worry that money for shelters will take away from funding for permanent supportive housing. Steinberg said that’s not the case. “It is not shelter versus permanent housing, and we’re going to change the name of this ‘right to shelter’ here, right on your show. It is the right to have a roof over your head. It’s the right to housing.”

The co-chairs also talked about rent stabilization that doesn’t kill the incentive to build affordable apartments, but at the same time, protects tenants.